For those of you still following along, we have come a long way in setting up the foundation for a personal virtualization platform. We finished the last post, Building a Developer Virtualization Lab - Part 2, by configuring Vagrant to provision a single container in our Proxmox cluster. Having done that, we now have set the stage for actually using our infrastructure to host multiple containers.

I concluded the last post by saying that this article would be around deploying a multi-node SolrCloud cluster. Well, this is not exactly true. Instead, we will lay the foundation by installing a multi-node ZooKeeper ensemble. We might as well deploy everything following an architecture that resembles a production deployment. My other motivation for starting with ZooKeeper first is that I also intend to run Hadoop and HBase on this infrastructure and HBase also has a dependency on ZooKeeper.

Before we get started, let's review the basic approach and assumptions:

Proxmox will continue to be our target deployment virtualization environment.

Chef, specifically, Chef Zero, will be used as the provisioner for Vagrant.

Our Vagrantfile will be updated to support multiple machines using the multi-machine support in Vagrant.